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Business process automation for human resources using maestro. Maestro is a workflow automation solution for Drupal - automated business processes.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: workflow automation is an essential tool that too few organizations leverage within their digital transformation. Unfortunate because it can provide some very tangible benefits along with cost and error reduction. This paper provides a simple use case - employee onboarding - which unfortunately too many organizations still do manually.

WHY IT MATTERS: workflow automation is an essential tool that too few organizations leverage within their digital transformation. Unfortunate because it can provide some very tangible benefits along with cost and error reduction. This paper provides a simple use case - employee onboarding - which unfortunately too many organizations still do manually.

What’s Squad? It’s a small cross-functional self-organized team with usually less than 8 people. They have end-to-end responsibilities and they work together toward long-term missions. On Squads, the key drive is autonomy.

Each Squad has autonomy to decide what to build, how to build it, and how to work together while building it, although they need to be aligned with the Squad mission, product strategy, and short-term goals.

“Be autonomous, but don’t sub-optimize!”.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: a great 2 part article on how to implement squads to organize your agile delivery teams.

In a nutshell, senior executives must move the company—and themselves—away from outmoded command-and-control behaviors and structures that are ill-suited to today’s rapid digital world. They must redouble efforts to overcome resource inertia and break down silos, because independent teams can’t overcome these bureaucratic challenges on their own. They must direct teams to the best opportunities, arm them with the best people, give them the tools they need to move fast, and oversee their work with a light but consistent touch.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: the issues raised in this article I see with every corporation I work with. They want agility and flexibility but executives don't let go of out-dated corporate structures and governance. Ultimately, they end up blaming employees and partners when they fail to deliver in a competitive way. Every executive I meet from this point forward will receive a copy of this article!

Additional economic growth, including from business dynamism and rising productivity growth, will also continue to create jobs. Many other new occupations that we cannot currently imagine will also emerge and may account for as much as 10 percent of jobs created by 2030, if history is a guide. Moreover, technology itself has historically been a net job creator. For example, the introduction of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s created millions of jobs not just for semiconductor makers, but also for software and app developers of all types, customer-service representatives, and information analysts.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: this is a positive news about new technologies. However we must brace ourselves because many people will loose their jobs and not have the skills - or the willingness - to adapt. This will certainly create turmoil in companies - and possible whole countries. Prepare.

How to adjust the operating model and revive stalled digital efforts. Specifically:

- Does the concept of an "organizational structure" still make sense? Or should we move to self-organizing, manager-less teams?- Should we scrap the idea of careers and employee loyalty in order to attract millennial talent for "tours of duty"?- Do we really need any specialists in house, or should we do everything through partners in the ecosystem?

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: digital transformation is more than just implementing new technologies. There must also be changes in processes and people, often with different organizational structures. This article from Bain presents different alternatives, along with pros and cons for each.

It may come as no surprise that technology-centric roles stole the show among emerging jobs in the United States, but the prevalence of machine learning and data science roles and skills indicate a shift in the types of technology we can expect to be using in the near future, as well as what professionals should be preparing themselves for.

Having an academic background and a comprehensive suite of skills were also strong trends, especially among professionals who are now machine learning engineers and data scientists. Both of these roles are also often held by professionals with 10 years or more of professional experience, so for those just starting out and having trouble landing one of these titles, don’t be discouraged!

It’s always a good reminder that soft skills will always be important, no matter the profession. The ability to collaborate, be a leader, and learn from colleagues will stand out in interviews, and even more once starting a job.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: the conclusion of the study is simple: go to University and study something related to technology. Simple, no?

Automation will eliminate jobs but it will also create them. Here are 21 jobs that will exist in the future.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: AI will replace many human activities - from driving trucks to auditing accounting books. Futurists predict that new jobs will emerge, jobs that today do not make sense but that in the future will become essential - same way that our ancestors in early 1900s would not have believed that data scientist or software programmer or webmaster would exist today...

By next year, around 75% of financial firms will either explore or implement artificial intelligence technologies, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. The research and consulting firm thinks some 15% of the industry’s jobs are at risk.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: social turmoil in the coming years. Trump has capitalized on coal workers fears of loosing their jobs. In 5 and 10 years, millions of workers in Finance, accounting, clerical jobs, but also truck drivers and warehouse workers will be out of a job - or fearing they will loose their jobs or seeing their salaries frozen or wages pressured in downward trends. They will be asked to retrain and maybe re-locate. Most won't and will expect their unions or their governments to do something against the business world and rich techies. We must - sadly - plan for social turmoil in the coming years.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology point out that when automotive transport arrived, a whole group of workers—horses—were displaced, never to be employed again. They lost their jobs and vanished from the economy.I would add another historical precedent. Offshoring in the last few decades has eaten up physical jobs and whole industries, jobs that were not replaced. The current transfer of jobs from the physical to the virtual economy is a different sort of offshoring, not to a foreign country but to a virtual one. If we follow recent history we can’t assume these jobs will be replaced either.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: the article very well sums up the changes that will impact us all - and the conclusion is bleak. When production is plentiful, very few have jobs. Having access to what is produced becomes the issue - if you don't have a job, you don't have the means to buy what gets produced. We will enter an era of social tensions and can only hope it will not be resolved in a 3rd world war.

The company got rid of formal, forced ranking around 10 years ago. But now, GE’s in the middle of a far bigger shift. It’s abandoning formal annual reviews and its legacy performance management system for its 300,000-strong workforce over the next couple of years, instead opting for a less regimented system of more frequent feedback via an app. For some employees, in smaller experimental groups, there won’t be any numerical rankings whatsoever.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY IT MATTERS: digital had the promise to change the way we work and bring the promise of meritocracy closer. This may be the start. I look forward to see the app itself and the process.

AI will change that because there is no way any human being can outsmart, for example, IBM’s Watson, at least without augmentation. Smart machines can process, store, and recall information faster and better than we humans. Additionally, AI can pattern-match faster and produce a wider array of alternatives than we can. AI can even learn faster. In an age of smart machines, our old definition of what makes a person smart doesn’t make sense.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

We must change the way we are and behave in the age of machine intelligence and this article provides great insights.

Some of the talent and tools won’t necessarily be found in-house. Here’s how to create a sustainable strategy for sourcing the right people and products.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Finding the right partner for digital implementations is key to any project success. Here McKinsey proposes criteria to help select the best ones but also how to design a process to ensure it can be managed globally in the organization.

“We have entered a world where workers are like professional athletes. They work for a company and contribute for a while, but when needs change, they move to another team, taking their skills and expertise with them. So the concept of a ‘job’ has changed and organizations have to manage their teams in a world of a rapidly changing, mobile, contingent working economy. Companies now have to move beyond ‘succession management’ to putting in place what we call programs for facilitated talent mobility.”

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

My role often is how to best select and deploy new digital technologies. But I must include the human aspect of the transformation - specifically which new skills are needed, how to update the org chart and whether to hire or outsource. I find that thinking of digital technology skilled employees as professional athletes helps a great deal. You hire/outsource for specific skill and role in your team, sometimes must pay a premium to get them (it's a seller's market) and be ready to trade them for another one in a few years or even months. C'est-la-vie!

From automation and benefits, to recruitment and coaching, HR tech companies are still disrupting HR.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

I've been tracking the impact of digital in HR for a while and have been surprised at how slow the HR professionals have been embracing the digital tools at their disposal. This summary from CBinsights shows that innovation is very dynamic and that there are many new tools to improve HR. However, I find resistance in the corporate leaders to fully finance HR departments to transform (HR is still seen as a cost center - so you minimize its expense / If you see it as a strategic group then you fund it appropriately because you see returns) - but I also see resistance in HR professionals not willing to transform their processes and ways of doing things. Lots to do in this field IMHO.

How I Burned 10 Million Dollars So You Don’t Have To. (An Education in Humility, Humanity, and Leadership).

In February, my startup (Twenty20) employed 35 people. We had a board-approved plan to scale to 85 by the end of the year. As of July, we were at 55, and well on our way. Now, four months later, our team size is 12.

Farid Mheir's insight:

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

I love those stories because they are real-life, pragmatic, and reflect the reality of startups. Should be true not only for startups but intrapreneurs and small groups that burst into life in larger organizations. Lesson to learn: don't grow until you know your business model. Also: self-service is good. Must read to give you confidence, hope and also scare you a little.

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